


Will it ever get better?

by Butterfish



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Coming Out, Confession, Love, M/M, Moving, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 22:21:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14861372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfish/pseuds/Butterfish
Summary: Arthur is going away, and he still hasn't told Alfred how he feels.





	Will it ever get better?

I’ve stood on Alfred’s porch many times before, but it’s today that I really notice everything about it. Like the potted plants his mum has shoved in the corner, or the crack in the wood to the left of the front door, or the fact that the letter box is missing its flap.

I take a deep breath. The air is warm. It’s summer, and it’s in the middle of the day when the sun is at its highest. Even in the shadow my skin is burning. I feel sweat trickling down my back. My palms are sticky. The more wet they get, the harder I have to grip the letter between my fingers, and the harder I grip the letter, the more damp the envelope becomes. I should just shove it through the hole and be gone. But I am frozen in hesitation. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself to calm down, and how I breathe as if I’ve been taught the Lamaze technique (- I haven’t).

I just. Can’t. Do it.

The first time I stood on this porch, I was seven years old. Grandma had just died, and the front yard was full of people wearing black. Back then it was summer too. Everyone sweated. I remember the red faces and the heavy breathing and the many, many bottles of lukewarm water stacked up on the steps. I remember Mum discussing what to do with the house. “I am not selling,” she kept saying. “I can’t do it. It’s too hard.” But three months later, as I passed by on my way to school, I saw someone else’s mum on the porch. I would soon come to know her as Mrs Jones. But I would come to know her son, Alfred, even better.

The Jones family was our opposite in every way. They were as rich as we were poor, as loud as we were quiet, and as open as we were closed. Don’t get me wrong - Mum is loving, and without her support I would never have made it through university. She spent every penny saved on my education, and she cheered me on every step of the way. She always said, “Life is a book - there will be ups and downs, but you must keep reading, because the ending could be spectacular.”

But we kept to ourselves. As a child, I didn’t understand why. I thought Mum just preferred the calm of our home. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that I understood Dad’s name was known far and wide, and not for the kind of thing you want to brag about. “He’s a child,” people would mumble about me when we passed them in the street, “do not blame him. But she? -she’s got blood on her hands.” I never asked for many details, because no one offered them to me, and the pain in Mum’s eyes when she looked at old photos of Dad was too great to bear.

So I grew up loved, but with a knack for staying silent and out of trouble, but Alfred however knew not when to shut his mouth. He was constantly in detention for something he did or said, and I always thought him annoying. Until one day in sixth form when his big mouth turned things around for me.

We were studying history, and we were meant to make a presentation on something that had happened in our local community. A group of guys decided to focus on the death of a young couple that had taken place quite some years back. As they spoke of the car crash, of the drunk driver and his inebriated wife, their eyes darted to me. When they spoke of the young newlyweds, their eyes narrowed. When they spoke the name of the convicted, it was my surname.

“Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I warn you,” one of them said.

Alfred threw an apple that smashed against the guy’s forehead as he shouted, “How ‘bout this one!”

The fight that ensued got Alfred a black eye and a broken little finger. I asked and was allowed to sit through detention with him. We didn’t talk. I didn’t want to know why he felt the need to stand up for me. His eyes said it all. Alfred was loud, but he was fair. From that day on, we stuck together like glue.

I look behind me as a car passes by on the street. In a panicked moment, I believe it may be Alfred coming home from class, but it’s a taxi, and it continues its journey down the street, around the corner, and out of sight. I wipe the sweat off my forehead and look back down at the envelope in my hand. In cursive I’ve written ‘ALFRED’ on front. I’ve underlined his name twice, as if to be certain his parents wouldn’t think the letter for themselves and open it. That idea alone is enough to make my heart beat faster.

What if they were to read it, what would they think, of me? Of him?

What would anyone think if they knew of how I’ve felt for the past three years? When sixth form ended, Alfred decided to hit the town to find a job, while I continued to study. It was Mum’s dream that I should get a degree, and I felt obliged to. I did enjoy the lectures, meeting new people, spending months outside our little village. Meeting people who did not care what my surname was, who did not believe that at home I was a quiet guy. I was able to take on a new persona, try new personalities, try new experiences. Drinking. Partying. Kissing. And-…

I swallow and close my eyes. More sweat drips over my eyelids, and I try to bash it away with my lases, but it seems to linger. It catches the corners of my eyes and rolls down. The more I wipe, the more trickles. I realise it’s not sweat.

I missed him so much. Throughout university, I missed him more than I can say. People came and went, friends and lovers and I never even really noted their names. Thinking back, I was horrible. I was horrible to them, because some of them really did care for me, even if the me they cared for was a made up persona. But they couldn’t fill the void that had grown inside of me, because they didn’t know of that void.

Even Alfred doesn’t know. Yet.

I take a step forward and reaches down and I let the letter rest on the broken edge of the hole. I push it in a little. I hesitate. If I let go now, I can not take it back. But if I don’t let go, he will never know. After all, my suitcases are packed. Mum is waiting in the car at home, ready to leave, drive me all the way across England to the airport. Who knows when I will be back. Who knows if I will want to return to my past ever again.

My fondest memory is last winter. Him and I, on this porch. It was cold, and we weren’t wearing jackets, and we drank beer and watched our misty breaths puff up around us. And I reached over to grab another beer, and he did too, and our hands met, and we kept them there, on top of the cold bottles, and neither of us spoke. Our fingers intertwined. In that moment we weren’t quite lovers, but we weren’t quite friends either. We were the same people who had spent every day in detention together, he by force and me by choice, and yet rarely hung out outside of school. Yet we were something more than mates. Something less than soulmates. Maybe becoming something more.

I am not making a sound, but I am crying. I see the tears drop to the envelope, and I realise I can’t let him have this letter. Because that same night, Alfred blabbered about how everything was perfect and how he wouldn’t want anything in his life to be different, and if he sees this letter, everything will change. Nothing will be the same. And I can’t bring that upon him.

I pull the letter back. But someone pulls the letter inside before I manage to fully retrieve it, and soon I stare at my empty hands. “What…” I kneel and look inside the hole and there, sitting on the other side, is Alfred’s cat with its paws resting on the letter. My eyes widen. “Fuck!” I grumble. I push my fingers through the hole, but the cat sees this as an opportunity to play. It dashes its paws forward and its claws scratch my fingertips and make me pull back.

“Shit!” I grimace as I stand up. In a moment of panic, I try the door, but of course it is locked. Alfred is at work. So are his parents. Perhaps I could try a window? As ridiculous as the idea seems, I step backwards to take in the facade of the house, wondering if I could climb anything and get through the chimney, but as I move, my back hits something warm and sturdy behind me, and Alfred’s amused voice asks,

“What’s this, a burglary?”

I spin around and stare up at him. “What’re you doing home?” I blurt before I can stop myself.

Alfred raises his brows. He also looks warm - his cheeks are red and his white tee sticks to his skin. “I… live here?”

“I mean, aren’t you meant to be at work?”

“Right, and I just need to change to my uniform,” he says and gestures down his casual clothing. “Real question is what you’re doing here?”

I wet my lips with the tip of my tongue and narrow my eyes. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“I’m going abroad. You know, that internship.”

“Oh, right. Today, is it?”

I nod slowly. “Yeah.”

“So you came to say goodbye when you thought I was at work?”

I feel myself redden even more. I am glad I am already sweating, else he might’ve seen the panic spread through my body. It makes me shiver a little. “Well, I only just remembered.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

We stand for a moment. I feel myself melting. Alfred looks like he’s trying to figure out what to say. Then he awkwardly offers me his hand. “Well, goodbye,” he says as I take it in mine. “I hope you have a great time.”

“You too,” I mumble and feel stupid the moment the words leave my mouth. I look at our hands as they bob up and down as old people concluding a job interview. When he pulls back, my hand lingers a second longer in the air before I drop it to my side. “Well,” I say as he walks past me, “bye.” And as I walk toward the garden gate, I feel the void inside of me grow even bigger.

Then I hear him call, “Arthur?”

I turn and look at him. I know the tears are rolling again, but to be honest? I don’t even care. “Yeah?” That’s when I see him standing with the door open, my letter, still unopened, in his hand. However his eyes are focused on me.

“Remember last winter how we sat here,” he says and gestures to the porch beneath him, “and I said how I hope things will never change.”

My stomach twists. I can only nod weakly.

“I said that because I couldn’t imagine things could get any better. Stupid, wasn’t it? To think I would reach the height of my life in my early twenties. But that’s what I thought at the time.”

I stand still and just stare at him. I am not sure what to think, or what to say.

Alfred’s hand clutches the letter to his chest, and he smiles. “Will things get even better?” he asks.

And now, slowly, I too smile. And I nod. “Of course,” I say. “Life is a book. It has ups and downs. But you have to read to the end.”

“Then,” he says and slowly sits down on the step of the porch. He rips the envelope open, carefully, as the paper is still damp, “I think I will read.”

I watch him. And I think to myself that we are still not quite mates and not quite soulmates. We are something in between. Maybe something even better. We will just have to see.


End file.
